Metallic Red

Being alone or in a small group in space is a classic story setup. Even before space people did it with ships, like Robinson Crusoe or Swiss Family Robinson. Movies like The Martian or Gravity, podcasts like Vast Horizon or Wolf 359 or Girl in Space, and IF games like Protocol or Seedship all deal with isolation in space.

To me, that says that there's something about the experience that satisfies some primal human urge for self-evaluation and discovery, like a spiritual quest to understand yourself. In this game, **Metallic Red**, you float through space, tend a garden, communicate on the internet, order packages, and get into Tarot; a very 2020 kind of life.

The gameplay is split into days, with a typically day consisting of browsing the web, checking your plants, and sleeping with strange dreams. It changes quite a bit by the end of the game.

The tone of the game is melancholic and isolated, with themes of change, loss, and growth. It is well-put together; the only thing that looked like a bug was a possibly repeated conversation.

I'm not sure whether the game was structured around a certain set of themes or if it was built around this character and just imagining what life would be like for a person. I wonder if it's the latter because (Spoiler - click to show)someone being raised religiously then becoming depressed as an adult, leaving the religion, and getting into gardening and tarot is such a universal experience that I know 2 or 3 people personally who have done it and dozens more online. So this could just be a way to take a universal experience and put it into space.

In any case, I liked this story. State isn't really tracked; you can use a chapter select to hop from part to part. I forgot one of the instructions during a cooking segment and couldn't figure out how to get out of it for a while, but I found that part satisfying.

Adapted from an IFCOMP24 Review

Verisimilitude is a great word. All those 'i’s in a row, playfully bookended by complementary phonics, they really sing, don’t they? It’s also kind of a holy grail in fiction, Interactive or otherwise. Which, on the surface, why? Why do we care? Certainly fairy tales, to pick one example, don’t give a flip about realism but obviously have staying power. But are they highly regarded? Eh… At its core, stories thrive on reader empathy, the ability to vibe with the piece on some fundamental emotional level. All too often though, intellect is the cold gatekeeper to our vulnerable emotional core. “Well, no one could clear the DMV that quickly therefore the rain kiss is invalid AND I NEED NOT CRY.”

Stories that effectively bat aside that self-important intellect succeed more than ones that don’t, and succeed MUCH more than ones that try to engage that intellect and fall short. Intellect just luuurves finding fault, that jerk. As a side note, intellect is powerless against ambiguity. Details left unexplored may create a chorus of background questions, but as long as the story doesn’t engage those questions the best intellect can do is whine in the distance. Give it concrete details though, and hoo boy it will go ham on them.

Is there anything more satisfying than watching a bully get his comeuppance? As dickish as intellect can be, a work that beats it at its own game? *chefs kiss* Man, does Metallic Red give it a drubbing, and it is glorious. This work opens as a solo space flight, where gameplay is clicking through the mundane but crucial tasks of keeping alive and sane in a tiny box hurtling through the unforgiving void. Choice-select is a great paradigm here. There are things that MUST be done, that the protagonist is well familiar with, and choice-select steers things in a totally acceptable way. You don’t really have a choice not to maintain your hydroponic garden because… death. If all it did was cycle the player through the amazingly well-conceived routine that would be enough. Where it augments those details with communications and external interactions it goes to a next level.

One of the harder things an author engaging verisimilitude needs to accomplish is convincing external communications, each with a purported unique fictional author. These communiques must SOUND like different people, not extensions of the narrator. As compelling as the daily routine was conceived, every interaction the protagonist has with the outside world is delightfully, amazingly, of its own voice and cadence. I have not seen this level of schizophrenia employed so effectively.

Then there were the dream sequences. The graphic presentation changes during these, which is always a welcome touch for me. More importantly, the dreams FELT like dreams. They were wildly diverse, and even when reflecting backstory and background did so in a convincingly dream-logic way, rather than the stealth flashback/infodumps these things can often be. Mostly. I was actually gleefully forming this thought as I played when one dream, culminating some accumulating hints, was basically an unadorned flashback/infodump. Damn you work, you let intellect up off the mat during the count! Fine, one misstep, in the face of everything else I can forgive that.

I really cannot overstate how well conceived and written this early gameplay was. I could have spent a full two hours just banging about the spaceship, so immersively seamless was its rendition. It was magnetic. Some delightful samples which are only a flavor, and may make more sense in context:

“chard: due to its tolerance for hydroponic growing methods.” [As a hydroponic hobbyist I can attest to chard’s unholy growth rate. I laughed out loud at “chard sphere.”]
"It’s not that you admire the past, more that you prefer to own things that can be taken for granted. "
“Bon Voyage? More like Bone Adios!”

Eventually, we segue to a more plotty, ‘explore your surroundings in service of a low key dramatic arc’ sequence. This part was no less well conceived than the first, but because gameplay paradigm shifted, the feel also shifted. Less premium was placed on verisimilitude, and more on narrative momentum. It is only slightly less accomplished at this, which couldn’t help but be deflating. Not a lot, just a little. In particular, the decision to put (Spoiler - click to show)a fiddly cooking puzzle inline to the plot really slowed things up for no reason. More importantly though, it felt like the emotional impact was missing.

This work battered, just crushed intellect in a thoroughly satisfying way. Yet, with unfettered access to emotion, it never quite engaged. Part was, I think, the slow drip of background that tried to build towards it. In addition to being overshadowed by the day-to-day details, it also presented as a cerebral ‘what is going on here?’ puzzle. Its solution then, when revealed, was more brainy than hearty. Another element was the details the work chose to share with us. We focused a lot on the protagonist’s (Spoiler - click to show)dissatisfactions and estrangement but not so much on their (Spoiler - click to show)initial religious engagement. By only giving us a one-sided view of the protagonist’s core dilemma, we don’t really appreciate the depth and drama of the final choice, no matter what the narrative belatedly tells us.

I’ve said enough on that. As a letdown, it was slight. The accomplished first half engaged me fully on the power of its writing and well thought out setting. The POWER of it was thrilling. It built such a good will that I was engaged through its breadth, even if the dial flickered a bit.

Shocking final twist: the denouement revealed that this work was a draft. ARE YOU KIDDING ME, A DRAFT??? Something this accomplished, this compelling, this well conceived, this is the FIRST PASS of the author’s brain? With that kind of intellectual ability, WHY AREN’T YOU CURING CANCER, AUTHOR??

Played: 9/16/24
Playtime: 45m
Artistic/Technical ratings: Engaging/Mostly Seamless
Would Play After Comp?: No, but likely to seek out rest of series

Artistic scale: Bouncy, Mechanical, Sparks of Joy, Engaging, Transcendent
Technical scale: Unplayable, Intrusive, Notable (Bugginess), Mostly Seamless, Seamless

At first, there are strong vibes of howling dogs. It's a Twine game set in a small cell-like environment -- though this time it's a space ship -- where we perform boring daily tasks and kill the time, while the environment seems to be decaying around us, and we experience strange dreams at night. A cookie cutter recreation of the original Twine sensation, then? Well, no, not at all.

The first difference that becomes apparent is the vibe. There's no sense of true alienation here, nor of helplessness, nor of confusion. The protagonist owns this space ship, even if its not much, and they have a measure of control over how they live -- if they can arse themselves to do it, they can tidy things up, grow plants, do some exercises. Basic self-care, sure, but there's a sense of ownership and accomplishment. "I can give you the gift of meaningful labour," is what a character will say to them later on, or words to that effect; and then too it is the mundane things, mixing a salad dressing and helping clean up a kitchen, that anchor life and self.

Basic self-care, and emails. It's a good storytelling device, used often because it works: messages coming to us from outside to paint a fuller picture of the world and our life. There's a father in the background, a friend who would like to meet us but is also willing to support us if we need to absent ourselves for a while, and a surprising amount of information about esotericism, including tarot, but mainly focused on some ancient Greek cultic beliefs which also inform some of the protagonist's dreams. The juxtaposition of spaceships and Eleusinian Mysteries is surprising, but it works.

It turns out that (Spoiler - click to show)we are travelling to a cult that made a base under the ground in some small, otherwise uninhabited planet. The cult is not scary at all; in fact, it feels a bit like coming home, seeing some old friends, sleeping in your old bed, having a sense of community. But the protagonist is here with a specific goal: they want to renounce their membership. The want to do undo the rituals, unsee the revelations, return to the state of the uninitiated. It's not clear whether this is possible, although there's certainly nobody who tries to stop them. It's perhaps also not clear what it means.

But, perhaps, if it means anything, it is renouncing dreams of what is beyond this world in order to truly anchor ourselves in meaningful labour. As they are returning to the awfully mundane, we must imagine them happy.

As you can no doubt tell, I liked Metallic Red. I especially admire its understated, subtle approach. There are wild elements here (space ships! cults!) but it handles them in a way that is the exact opposite of pulp, going instead for the quotidian, for the mundane, for the abandonment of grand grand dreams that mean to pull us away from the solid core of our very material life. We need no blind seers to show us the way.